I have here before me an edition of
the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” bound in
green, without a date, and described as “illustrated
by nearly three hundred engravings, and memoir of
Bunyan.” On the outside it is lettered
“Bagster’s Illustrated Edition,”
and after the author’s apology, facing the first
page of the tale, a folding pictorial “Plan of
the Road” is marked as “drawn by the late
Mr. T. Conder,” and engraved by J. Basire.
No further information is anywhere vouchsafed; perhaps
the publishers had judged the work too unimportant;
and we are still left ignorant whether or not we owe
the woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same
hand that drew the plan. It seems, however, more
than probable. The literal particularity of mind
which, in the map, laid down the flower-plots in the
devil’s garden, and carefully introduced the
court-house in the town of Vanity, is closely paralleled
in many of the cuts; and in both, the architecture
of the buildings and the disposition of the gardens
have a kindred and entirely English air. Whoever
he was, the author of these wonderful little pictures
may lay claim to be the best illustrator of Bunyan.
They are not only good illustrations, like so many
others; but they are like so few, good illustrations
of Bunyan. Their spirit, in defect and quality,
is still the same as his own. The designer also
has lain down and dreamed a dream, as literal, as
quaint, and almost as apposite as Bunyan’s; and
text and pictures make but the two sides of the same
homespun yet impassioned story. To do justice
to the designs, it will be necessary to say, for the
hundredth time, a word or two about the masterpiece
which they adorn.

All allegories have a tendency to
escape from the purpose of their creators; and as
the characters and incidents become more and more
interesting in themselves, the moral, which these were
to show forth, falls more and more into neglect.
An architect may command a wreath of vine-leaves round
the cornice of a monument; but if, as each leaf came
from the chisel, it took proper life and fluttered
freely on the wall, and if the vine grew, and the
building were hidden over with foliage and fruit,
the architect would stand in much the same situation
as the writer of allegories. The “FaÃ«ry
Queen” was an allegory, I am willing to believe;
but it survives as an imaginative tale in incomparable
verse. The case of Bunyan is widely different;
and yet in this also Allegory, poor nymph, although
never quite forgotten, is sometimes rudely thrust
against the wall. Bunyan was fervently in earnest;
with “his fingers in his ears, he ran on,”
straight for his mark. He tells us himself, in
the conclusion to the first part, that he did not
fear to raise a laugh; indeed, he feared nothing,
and said anything; and he was greatly served in this
by a certain rustic privilege of his style, which,
like the talk of strong uneducated men, when it does
not impress by its force, still charms by its simplicity.
The mere story and the allegorical design enjoyed
perhaps his equal favour. He believed in both
with an energy of faith that was capable of moving
mountains. And we have to remark in him, not
the parts where inspiration fails and is supplied by
cold and merely decorative invention, but the parts
where faith has grown to be credulity, and his characters
become so real to him that he forgets the end of their
creation. We can follow him step by step into
the trap which he lays for himself by his own entire
good faith and triumphant literality of vision, till
the trap closes and shuts him in an inconsistency.
The allegories of the Interpreter and of the Shepherds
of the Delectable Mountains are all actually performed,
like stage-plays, before the pilgrims. The son
of Mr. Great-grace visibly “tumbles hills about
with his words.” Adam the First has his
condemnation written visibly on his forehead, so that
Faithful reads it. At the very instant the net
closes round the pilgrims, “the white robe falls
from the black man’s body.” Despair
“getteth him a grievous crab-tree cudgel”;
it was in “sunshiny weather” that he had
his fits; and the birds in the grove about the House
Beautiful, “our country birds,” only sing
their little pious verses “at the spring, when
the flowers appear and the sun shines warm.”
“I often,” says Piety, “go out to
hear them; we also ofttimes keep them tame on our
house.” The post between Beulah and the
Celestial City sounds his horn, as you may yet hear
in country places. Madam Bubble, that “tall,
comely dame, something of a swarthy complexion, in
very pleasant attire, but old,” “gives
you a smile at the end of each sentence” ­a
real woman she; we all know her. Christiana dying
“gave Mr. Stand-fast a ring,” for no possible
reason in the allegory, merely because the touch was
human and affecting. Look at Great-heart, with
his soldierly ways, garrison ways, as I had almost
called them; with his taste in weapons; his delight
in any that “he found to be a man of his hands”;
his chivalrous point of honour, letting Giant Maul
get up again when he was down, a thing fairly flying
in the teeth of the moral; above all, with his language
in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing: “I
thought I should have lost my man” ­“chicken-hearted” ­“at
last he came in, and I will say that for my lord,
he carried it wonderful lovingly to him.”
This is no Independent minister; this is a stout,
honest, big-busted ancient, adjusting his shoulder-belts,
twirling his long moustaches as he speaks. Last
and most remarkable, “My sword,” says the
dying Valiant-for-Truth, he in whom Great-heart delighted,
“my sword I give to him that shall succeed me
in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him
that can get it.” And after this boast,
more arrogantly unorthodox than was ever dreamed of
by the rejected Ignorance, we are told that “all
the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

In every page the book is stamped
with the same energy of vision and the same energy
of belief. The quality is equally and indifferently
displayed in the spirit of the fighting, the tenderness
of the pathos, the startling vigour and strangeness
of the incidents, the natural strain of the conversations,
and the humanity and charm of the characters.
Trivial talk over a meal, the dying words of heroes,
the delights of Beulah or the Celestial City, Apollyon
and my Lord Hate-good, Great-heart, and Mr. Worldly-Wiseman,
all have been imagined with the same clearness, all
written of with equal gusto and precision, all created
in the same mixed element, of simplicity that is almost
comical, and art that, for its purpose, is faultless.

It was in much the same spirit that
our artist sat down to his drawings. He is by
nature a Bunyan of the pencil. He, too, will draw
anything, from a butcher at work on a dead sheep,
up to the courts of Heaven. “A Lamb for
Supper” is the name of one of his designs, “Their
Glorious Entry” of another. He has the
same disregard for the ridiculous, and enjoys somewhat
of the same privilege of style, so that we are pleased
even when we laugh the most. He is literal to
the verge of folly. If dust is to be raised from
the unswept parlour, you may be sure it will “fly
abundantly” in the picture. If Faithful
is to lie “as dead” before Moses, dead
he shall lie with a warrant ­dead and stiff
like granite; nay (and here the artist must enhance
upon the symbolism of the author), it is with the
identical stone tables of the law that Moses fells
the sinner. Good and bad people, whom we at once
distinguish in the text by their names, Hopeful, Honest,
and Valiant-for-Truth, on the one hand, as against
By-ends, Sir Having Greedy, and the Lord Old-man on
the other, are in these drawings as simply distinguished
by their costume. Good people, when not armed
cap-Ã -pie, wear a speckled tunic girt about
the waist, and low hats, apparently of straw.
Bad people swagger in tail-coats and chimney-pots,
a few with knee-breeches, but the large majority in
trousers, and for all the world like guests at a garden-party.
Worldly-Wiseman alone, by some inexplicable quirk,
stands before Christian in laced hat, embroidered
waistcoat, and trunk-hose. But above all examples
of this artist’s intrepidity, commend me to the
print entitled “Christian Finds it Deep.”
“A great darkness and horror,” says the
text, have fallen on the pilgrim; it is the comfortless
deathbed with which Bunyan so strikingly concludes
the sorrows and conflicts of his hero. How to
represent this worthily the artist knew not; and yet
he was determined to represent it somehow. This
was how he did: Hopeful is still shown to his
neck above the water of death; but Christian has bodily
disappeared, and a blot of solid blackness indicates
his place.

As you continue to look at these pictures,
about an inch square for the most part, sometimes
printed three or more to the page, and each having
a printed legend of its own, however trivial the event
recorded, you will soon become aware of two things:
first, that the man can draw, and, second, that he
possesses the gift of an imagination. “Obstinate
reviles,” says the legend; and you should see
Obstinate reviling. “He warily retraces
his steps”; and there is Christian, posting through
the plain, terror and speed in every muscle.
“Mercy yearns to go” shows you a plain
interior with packing going forward, and, right in
the middle, Mercy yearning to go ­every
line of the girl’s figure yearning. In “The
Chamber called Peace” we see a simple English
room, bed with white curtains, window valance and
door, as may be found in many thousand unpretentious
houses; but far off, through the open window, we behold
the sun uprising out of a great plain, and Christian
hails it with his hand:

“Where am I now! is this the love
and care
Of Jesus, for the men that pilgrims
are!
Thus to provide! That I should
be forgiven!
And dwell already the next door
to heaven!”

A page or two further, from the top
of the House Beautiful, the damsels point his gaze
toward the Delectable Mountains: “The Prospect,”
so the cut is ticketed ­and I shall be surprised,
if on less than a square of paper you can show me
one so wide and fair. Down a cross road on an
English plain, a cathedral city outlined on the horizon,
a hazel shaw upon the left, comes Madam Wanton dancing
with her fair enchanted cup, and Faithful, book in
hand, half pauses. The cut is perfect as a symbol;
the giddy movement of the sorceress, the uncertain
poise of the man struck to the heart by a temptation,
the contrast of that even plain of life whereon he
journeys with the bold, ideal bearing of the wanton ­the
artist who invented and portrayed this had not merely
read Bunyan, he had also thoughtfully lived.
The Delectable Mountains ­I continue skimming
the first part ­are not on the whole happily
rendered. Once, and once only, the note is struck,
when Christian and Hopeful are seen coming, shoulder-high,
through a thicket of green shrubs ­box, perhaps,
or perfumed nutmeg; while behind them, domed or pointed,
the hills stand ranged against the sky. A little
further, and we come to that masterpiece of Bunyan’s
insight into life, the Enchanted Ground; where, in
a few traits, he has set down the latter end of such
a number of the would-be good; where his allegory
goes so deep that, to people looking seriously on
life, it cuts like satire. The true significance
of this invention lies, of course, far out of the
way of drawing; only one feature, the great tedium
of the land, the growing weariness in welldoing, may
be somewhat represented in a symbol. The pilgrims
are near the end: “Two Miles Yet,”
says the legend. The road goes ploughing up and
down over a rolling heath; the wayfarers, with outstretched
arms, are already sunk to the knees over the brow
of the nearest hill; they have just passed a milestone
with the cipher two; from overhead a great, piled,
summer cumulus, as of a slumberous summer afternoon,
beshadows them: two miles! it might be hundreds.
In dealing with the Land of Beulah the artist lags,
in both parts, miserably behind the text, but in the
distant prospect of the Celestial City more than regains
his own. You will remember when Christian and
Hopeful “with desire fell sick.”
“Effect of the Sunbeams” is the artist’s
title. Against the sky, upon a cliffy mountain,
the radiant temple beams upon them over deep, subjacent
woods; they, behind a mound, as if seeking shelter
from the splendour ­one prostrate on his
face, one kneeling, and with hands ecstatically lifted ­yearn
with passion after that immortal city. Turn the
page, and we behold them walking by the very shores
of death; Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen
half-way to the zenith, and sheds a wider glory; and
the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness, walk
and sing out of the fulness of their hearts. No
cut more thoroughly illustrates at once the merit
and the weakness of the artist. Each pilgrim
sings with a book in his grasp ­a family
Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly
enormous that our second impulse is to laughter.
And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps
the last. Something in the attitude of the manikins ­faces
they have none, they are too small for that ­something
in the way they swing these monstrous volumes to their
singing, something perhaps borrowed from the text,
some subtle differentiation from the cut that went
before and the cut that follows after ­something,
at least, speaks clearly of a fearful joy, of Heaven
seen from the deathbed, of the horror of the last passage
no less than of the glorious coming home. There
is that in the action of one of them which always
reminds me, with a difference, of that haunting last
glimpse of Thomas Idle, travelling to Tyburn in the
cart. Next come the Shining Ones, wooden and
trivial enough; the pilgrims pass into the river;
the blot already mentioned settles over and obliterates
Christian. In two more cuts we behold them drawing
nearer to the other shore; and then, between two radiant
angels, one of whom points upward, we see them mounting
in new weeds, their former lendings left behind them
on the inky river. More angels meet them; Heaven
is displayed, and if no better, certainly no worse,
than it has been shown by others ­a place,
at least, infinitely populous and glorious with light ­a
place that haunts solemnly the hearts of children.
And then this symbolic draughtsman once more strikes
into his proper vein. Three cuts conclude the
first part. In the first the gates close, black
against the glory struggling from within. The
second shows us Ignorance ­alas! poor Arminian! ­hailing,
in a sad twilight, the ferryman Vain-Hope; and in
the third we behold him, bound hand and foot, and black
already with the hue of his eternal fate, carried
high over the mountain-tops of the world by two angels
of the anger of the Lord. “Carried to Another
Place,” the artist enigmatically names his plate ­a
terrible design.

Wherever he touches on the black side
of the supernatural his pencil grows more daring and
incisive. He has many true inventions in the
perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares
realised. It is not easy to select the best;
some may like one and some another; the nude, depilated
devil bounding and casting darts against the Wicket
Gate; the scroll of flying horrors that hang over Christian
by the Mouth of Hell; the horned shade that comes
behind him whispering blasphemies; the daylight breaking
through that rent cave-mouth of the mountains and
falling chill adown the haunted tunnel; Christian’s
further progress along the causeway, between the two
black pools, where, at every yard or two, a gin, a
pitfall, or a snare awaits the passer-by ­loathsome
white devilkins harbouring close under the bank to
work the springes, Christian himself pausing and pricking
with his sword’s point at the nearest noose,
and pale discomfortable mountains rising on the farther
side; or yet again, the two ill-favoured ones that
beset the first of Christian’s journey, with
the frog-like structure of the skull, the frog-like
limberness of limbs ­crafty, slippery, lustful-looking
devils, drawn always in outline as though possessed
of a dim, infernal luminosity. Horrid fellows
are they, one and all; horrid fellows and horrific
scenes. In another spirit that Good-Conscience
“to whom Mr. Honest had spoken in his lifetime,”
a cowled, grey, awful figure, one hand pointing to
the heavenly shore, realises, I will not say all, but
some at least of the strange impressiveness of Bunyan’s
words. It is no easy nor pleasant thing to speak
in one’s lifetime with Good-Conscience; he is
an austere, unearthly friend, whom maybe Torquemada
knew; and the folds of his raiment are not merely
claustral, but have something of the horror of the
pall. Be not afraid, however; with the hand of
that appearance Mr. Honest will get safe across.

Yet perhaps it is in sequences that
this artist best displays himself. He loves to
look at either side of a thing: as, for instance,
when he shows us both sides of the wall ­“Grace
Inextinguishable” on the one side, with the
devil vainly pouring buckets on the flame, and “The
Oil of Grace” on the other, where the Holy Spirit,
vessel in hand, still secretly supplies the fire.
He loves, also, to show us the same event twice over,
and to repeat his instantaneous photographs at the
interval of but a moment. So we have, first,
the whole troop of pilgrims coming up to Valiant,
and Great-heart to the front, spear in hand and parleying;
and next, the same cross-roads, from a more distant
view, the convoy now scattered and looking safely
and curiously on, and Valiant handing over for inspection
his “right Jerusalem blade.” It is
true that this designer has no great care after consistency:
Apollyon’s spear is laid by, his quiver of darts
will disappear, whenever they might hinder the designer’s
freedom; and the fiend’s tail is blobbed or forked
at his good pleasure. But this is not unsuitable
to the illustration of the fervent Bunyan, breathing
hurry and momentary inspiration. He, with his
hot purpose, hunting sinners with a lasso, shall himself
forget the things that he has written yesterday.
He shall first slay Heedless in the Valley of the
Shadow, and then take leave of him talking in his
sleep, as if nothing had happened, in an arbour on
the Enchanted Ground. And again, in his rhymed
prologue, he shall assign some of the glory of the
siege of Doubting Castle to his favourite Valiant-for-the-Truth,
who did not meet with the besiegers till long after,
at that dangerous corner by Deadman’s Lane.
And, with all inconsistencies and freedoms, there
is a power shown in these sequences of cuts: a
power of joining on one action or one humour to another;
a power of following out the moods, even of the dismal
subterhuman fiends engendered by the artist’s
fancy; a power of sustained continuous realisation,
step by step, in nature’s order, that can tell
a story, in all its ins and outs, its pauses and surprises,
fully and figuratively, like the art of words.

One such sequence is the fight of
Christian and Apollyon ­six cuts, weird
and fiery, like the text. The pilgrim is throughout
a pale and stockish figure; but the devil covers a
multitude of defects. There is no better devil
of the conventional order than our artist’s Apollyon,
with his mane, his wings, his bestial legs, his changing
and terrifying expression, his infernal energy to
slay. In cut the first you see him afar off,
still obscure in form, but already formidable in suggestion.
Cut the second, “The Fiend in Discourse,”
represents him, not reasoning, railing rather, shaking
his spear at the pilgrim, his shoulder advanced, his
tail writhing in the air, his foot ready for a spring,
while Christian stands back a little, timidly defensive.
The third illustrates these magnificent words:
“Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole
breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in
this matter: prepare thyself to die; for I swear
by my infernal den that thou shalt go no farther:
here will I spill thy soul! And with that he threw
a flaming dart at his breast.” In the cut
he throws a dart with either hand, belching pointed
flames out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans,
and straddling the while across the path, as only
a fiend can straddle who has just sworn by his infernal
den. The defence will not be long against such
vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy.
And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily
upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion, and roaring
as he leaps. The fifth shows the climacteric of
the battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got
his sword, and dealt that deadly home-thrust, the
fiend still stretched upon him, but “giving
back, as one that had received his mortal wound.”
The raised head, the bellowing mouth, the paw clapped
upon the sword, the one wing relaxed in agony, all
realise vividly these words of the text. In the
sixth and last, the trivial armed figure of the pilgrim
is seen kneeling with clasped hands on the betrodden
scene of contest and among the shivers of the darts;
while just at the margin the hinder quarters and the
tail of Apollyon are whisking off, indignant and discomfited.

In one point only do these pictures
seem to be unworthy of the text, and that point is
one rather of the difference of arts than the difference
of artists. Throughout his best and worst, in
his highest and most divine imaginations as in the
narrowest sallies of his sectarianism, the human-hearted
piety of Bunyan touches and ennobles, convinces, accuses
the reader. Through no art beside the art of words
can the kindness of a man’s affections be expressed.
In the cuts you shall find faithfully parodied the
quaintness and the power, the triviality and the surprising
freshness of the author’s fancy; there you shall
find him outstripped in ready symbolism and the art
of bringing things essentially invisible before the
eyes: but to feel the contact of essential goodness,
to be made in love with piety, the book must be read
and not the prints examined.

Farewell should not be taken with
a grudge; nor can I dismiss in any other words than
those of gratitude a series of pictures which have,
to one at least, been the visible embodiment of Bunyan
from childhood up, and shown him, through all his
years, Great-heart lungeing at Giant Maul, and Apollyon
breathing fire at Christian, and every turn and town
along the road to the Celestial City, and that bright
place itself, seen as to a stave of music, shining
afar off upon the hill-top, the candle of the world.

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